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How Europe underdeveloped Africa: the legacy of Walter Rodney

By Lee Wengraf

June 16, 2017 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewalreposted from Review of African Political Economy — A number of African economies have
experienced a massive boom in wealth and investment over the past decade
Yet most ordinary Africans live in dire poverty with diminished life
expectancy, high unemployment and in societies with low-levels of
industry. For the roots of these conditions of “under-development,” one
historical account stands alone in importance: Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972).

Walter Rodney was a scholar, working
class militant and revolutionary from Guyana. Influenced by Marxist
ideas, he is central to the Pan-Africanist canon for many on the left.
In How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Rodney situates himself in several
theoretical traditions: the writings of Caribbean revolutionary Frantz
Fanon, the dependency theories of Immanuel Gunder Frank and others, the
Pan-Africanist tradition including George Padmore and C.L.R. James, and
African socialism as popularized by national leaders such as Tanzania’s
Julius Kambarage Nyerere and Guinea’s Ahmed Sékou Touré. As Horace
Campbell describes, “His numerous writings on the subjects of socialism,
imperialism, working class struggles and Pan Africanism and slavery
contributed to a body of knowledge that came to be known as the Dar es
Salaam School of Thought. Issa Shivji, Mahmood Mamdani, Claude Ake,
Archie Mafeje, Yash Tandon, John Saul, Dan Nabudere, O Nnoli, Clive
Thomas and countless others participated in the debates on
transformation and liberation.”[1]

Rodney’s scholarship and leadership in
the working-class movement thus had a long reach, including within the
revolutionary movement in his native Guyana. He was assassinated on June
13, 1980, likely by agents of the Guyanese government. The Nigerian
novelist, Wole Soyinka, in noting Rodney’s legacy, wrote how “Walter
Rodney was no captive intellectual playing to the gallery of local or
international radicalism. He was clearly one of the most solidly
ideologically situated intellectuals ever to look colonialism and
exploitation in the eye and where necessary, spit in it."[2]

Rodney’s work has assumed a
foundational place in understanding the legacies of slavery and
colonialism for the underdevelopment that unfolded, over centuries, on
the continent. The core of his analysis rests on the assumption that
Africa – far from standing outside the world system – has been crucial
to the growth of capitalism in the West. What he terms
“underdevelopment” was in fact the product of centuries of slavery,
exploitation and imperialism. Rodney conclusively shows that “Europe” –
that is, the colonial and imperial powers – did not merely enrich their
own empires but actually reversed economic and social development in
Africa. Thus, in his extensive account of African history from the early
African empires through to the modern day, Rodney shows how the West
built immense industrial and colonial empires on the backs of African
slave labor, devastating natural resources and African societies in the
process. As he emphasizes throughout How Europe Underdeveloped Africa,
“[i]t would be an act of the most brazen fraud to weigh the social
amenities provided during the colonial epoch against the exploitation,
and to arrive at the conclusion that the good outweighed the bad."[3]

For Rodney, underdevelopment is a
condition historically produced through capitalist expansion and
imperialism, and very clearly not an intrinsic property of Africa
itself. He thus situates underdevelopment within the contradictory
process of capitalism, one that both creates value and wealth for the
exploiters while immiserating the exploited. Rodney writes:

The peasants and workers of
Europe (and eventually the inhabitants of the whole world) paid a huge
price so that the capitalists could make their profit from the human
labor that always lies behind the machines…. There was a period when the
capitalist system increased the well-being of significant numbers of
people as a by-product of seeking out profits for a few, but today the
quest for profits comes into sharp conflict with people’s demands that
their materials and social needs should be fulfilled.[4]

As Rodney describes, African trade was
central to its growth, most importantly through the slave trade from
approximately 1445 to 1870, transforming Africa into a source of human
raw material for the new colonies in North America and the Caribbean. It
was to the three major powers involved in the slave trade – Britain,
France and Portugal –that massive profits accrued. Trade with Africa was
closely tied up with the growth of European port cities such as
England’s Liverpool, with the exchange of slaves for cheap industrial
goods established as the primary motor for profits of European firms.
Drawing on the work of Eric Williams’ classic Capitalism and Slavery
(1944), among others, Rodney concludes that the slave trade provided
England with the capital for the Industrial Revolution to take off and
with the dominant edge over its rivals.

Yet as Rodney shows, the “development”
of African societies was thwarted in this process of capital expansion,
first and foremost through the lost labor potential due to the slave
trade. From its economic foundation in slavery, the range of exports
from Africa narrowed to just a few commodities, undermining the
development of productive capacity in Africa itself. These trade
relations meant that technological development stagnated, creating a
barrier to innovation within Africa itself, even in regions not directly
engaged in the slave trade, because of the distorting influence on
relations overall. The result, concludes Rodney, was “a loss of
development opportunity, and this is of the greatest importance…. The
lines of economic activity attached to foreign trade were either
destructive, as slavery was, or at best purely extractive.”[5]

The nineteenth century “race for
Africa” broke out, with European “explorers” seeking out access to raw
materials. By the 1870s, colonial powers had expanded into new African
territory, primarily through the use of force, further consolidating
imperial powers and rivalries. By 1876, on the eve of the “scramble for
Africa,” European powers controlled only 10% of the continent, namely
Algeria, Cape Colony, Mozambique and Angola. Yet after the infamous
Berlin Conference of 1885 and the partition of Africa, “The number of
genuinely independent states outside of Europe and the Americas could be
counted on one hand – the remains of the Ottoman Empire, Thailand,
Ethiopia and Afghanistan.”[6]

Racist ideology justified and
facilitated European imperialism in Africa as a “civilizing mission,” or
as Rodney remarks, “Revolutionary African thinkers such as Frantz Fanon
and Amilcar Cabral …spoke of colonialism having made Africans into
objects of history. Colonised Africans, like pre-colonial African
chattel slaves, were pushed around into positions which suited European
interests and which were damaging to the African continent and its
peoples.”[7]
Nonetheless, Africans met European expansion with great resistance,
targeting forced labor schemes and taxation, restrictive land ownership
laws and later, imposed forced conscription during World War I. Workers
went on strike and engaged in boycotts, and nationalist organizations –
many of them illegal – were formed from the earliest days of colonial
rule.

Yet African resistance during that
period was caught between larger forces. The European “scramble for
Africa” subjected independent states to colonial rule, transforming
peasant and trading societies within a short span of time into a wage
labor and cash crop system. The increasingly intense economic
competition in European capitalism that eventually exploded into World
War I likewise spilled over into military clashes in Africa. Alliances
between and against the various powers attempted to block each other’s
rivals, with France and Britain seeking competing axes of control over
the continent.

Colonial brutality was the standard
practice across virtually the entire continent, with the chief aim of
leveraging force to subdue resistance and to extract profits. Turning
Africa into a conveyor belt for raw materials and industrial goods
required transportation and communication systems and, as Rodney
describes, a pacified – and minimally educated – labor force. The major
powers on the continent set up administrative apparatuses that in some
cases utilized local rulers, but, as Rodney writes, in no instance would
the colonizers accept African self-rule. Infrastructure such as roads
were built not only to facilitate the movement of commodities and
machinery, but also that of the colonial armies and police relied upon
to discipline the indigenous population, whether the expulsion of people
from their land or the forced cultivation of cash crops. Industrial
development was thwarted in Africa itself because manufacturing and the
processing of raw materials happened exclusively overseas.

Europeans divide-and-conquer tactics
won a tiny section of African rulers to back the annexation by one power
versus another. As Rodney puts it, “One of the decisive features of the
colonial system was the presence of Africans serving as economic,
political or cultural agents of the European colonialists…. agents or
‘compradors’ already serving [their] interests in the pre-colonial
period.” Following Fanon on the role of local elites, Rodney is scathing
in his contempt for the “puppets” of “metropolitan” capitalism, where
“the presence of a group of African sell-outs is part of the definition
of underdevelopment.”[8]

For Rodney, “The colonisation of Africa
and other parts of the world formed an indispensable link in a chain of
events which made possible the technological transformation of the base
of European capitalism.” Copper from the Congo, iron from West Africa,
chrome from Rhodesia and South Africa, and more, took capitalist
development to unprecedented heights of what Rodney calls “investible
surpluses.” The tendency within the drive for profit towards innovation
and scientific advancement built a “massive industrial complex,” as
Rodney described it.[9]
African trade not only generated economic growth and profits, but
created capacity for future growth in what he called the “metropoles,”
meaning the global centers of political and economic power located in
Europe.

Colonial policies heightened
exploitation, such as those preventing Africans from growing cash crops
drove workers into forced labor like the building of infrastructure to
facilitate extraction. Thus, capital accumulation was derived at the
expense of greatly-weakened African states and economies, effectively
reversing previous development. These two processes were dialectically
related. As Rodney writes, “The wealth that was created by African labor
and from African resources was grabbed by the capitalist countries of
Europe; and in the second place, restrictions were placed upon African
capacity to make the maximum use of its economic potential.”[10]
This process of underdevelopment only intensified over time: as Rodney
points out, investment and “foreign capital” in colonial Africa was
derived from past exploitation and provided the historical basis for
further expansion. “What was called ‘profits’ in one year came back as
‘capital’ the next…. What was foreign about the capital in colonial
Africa was its ownership and not its initial source.”[11]

Rodney argued that development in the
so-called “periphery” was proportional to the degree of independence
from the “metropolis,” a central tenet of the dependency theorists. He
looked to state-directed, national development in the post-colonial
period as a template for growth, a model proven – particularly in the
years after Rodney’s death – not to be viable. National development in
Africa, as elsewhere, proved unable to overcome the legacy of
colonialism and weak economies. The wake of such failures and the onset
of global crisis pushed many African states into the vice-grip of
neo-liberal structural adjustment “reforms” that brought only austerity
and crushing Third World debt.

These ideas had a distinctive imprint
on Rodney’s variant of Marxism and that of many leftists of his day. For
Rodney, independence in Africa rested on “development by
contradiction,” by which he meant that the contradictions within African
society were only resolvable by “Africans’ regaining their sovereignty
as a people.”[12]
In his view, the disproportionate weight and importance of even a small
African working class offered potentially a more stable base of
resistance. But, he emphasizes, that possibility cannot be fully
realized as in the “developed” world because production in Africa
proceeded on a different path than in Europe. In the latter, the
destruction of agrarian and craft economies increased productive
capacity through the development of factories and a mass working class.
In Africa, he argues, that process was distorted: local craft industry
was destroyed, yet large-scale industry was not developed outside of
agriculture and extraction, with workers restricted to the lowest-paid,
most unskilled work. “Capitalism in the form of colonialism failed to
perform in Africa the tasks which it had performed in Europe in changing
social relations and liberating the forces of production.”[13] So, concludes Rodney, the African working class is too small and too
weak to play a liberatory role in the current period. Instead, somewhat
reluctantly, he identifies the intelligentsia for that role:

Altogether, the educated
played a role in African independence struggles far out of proportion to
their numbers, because they took it upon themselves and were called
upon to articulate the interests of all Africans. They were also
required to … focus on the main contradiction, which was between the
colony and the metropole. …The contradiction between the educated and
the colonialists was not the most profound. …However, while the
differences lasted between the colonizers and the African educated, they
were decisive.[14]

Thus, while Rodney sees the “principal
divide” within capitalism as that between capitalists and workers, the
revolutionary role for the African working class was nonetheless a task
for another day. On this score, Rodney was mistaken: mass upheavals by
workers across the continent have shown the capacity for struggle, from
the colonial period up to the present day.

Yet, however contradictorily, Rodney’s
ideas on political leadership and liberation indicate the potential for
resistance under today’s conditions. First, as we have seen, Rodney –
following Fanon – was keenly aware of the class contradictions embedded
in the new African ruling classes, tensions bound to be thrust to the
surface with greater clarity. He writes: “Most African leaders of the
intelligentsia… were frankly capitalist, and shared fully the ideology
of their bourgeois masters…. As far as the mass of peasants and workers
were concerned, the removal of overt foreign rule actually cleared the
way towards a more fundamental appreciation of exploitation and
imperialism.”[15]
This dynamic has only been accentuated over time. Furthermore, Rodney
implies, internationalism on a class basis lay in the historical
development of capitalism and solidarity as a crucial “political”
question. “European workers have paid a great price for the few material
benefits which accrued to them as crumbs from the colonial table,” he
writes. “The capitalists misinformed and mis-educated workers in the
metropoles to the point where they became allies in colonial
exploitation. In accepting to be led like sheep, European workers were
perpetuating their own enslavement to the capitalists.”[16]

Rodney’s characterization of European
workers “led like sheep” may be too simplistic a description of workers’
understanding of capitalism. But Rodney is correct in stressing that
racist ideas undermined their own liberation. The “crumbs” Rodney
describes are the products of divisions sown by ruling class ideology,
and not of insurmountable material barriers. Actually realizing this
(future) possibility – that of an international movement of workers of
Africa and the West – has much to be gained from Rodney’s invaluable
research and analysis.